Hot Art (39 page)

“Exactly,” Paul said. “A sleepy little town. What better place for a retired thief to end up? I like it here. It's very quiet, out of the way. I stay out of London if I can help it.”

We turned down a small road with modest houses that ended at the sea. Paul's house, the last on the block, faced the waves. There was an overcast sky, a pebble beach that reminded me of Brighton, and a pub just next door with a view of the water. Home. Paul parked the Mercedes in front of his house, between his front door and the sea. The outside doors and windows had drawn shades—every one. In the kitchen, beside a row of empty champagne bottles on the counter, he pulled up his pant leg to show an electronic bracelet fastened to his ankle.

“I cannot take this off. I shower with it on. Everything. So they can track me at all times,” he said. “It's not so bad. It's better than prison.”

Then we walked outside again. We looked for a moment at the water, and then went next door, for lunch. Inside, everyone knew his name. “Hey, Paul.” “Good afternoon, Paul.” “How are you, Paul?”

“Do they know about your career?” I asked.

“Most of them know,” he said. “They've seen me interviewed, with television crews and all that.”

Paul ordered steak, shrimp, mashed potatoes, steamed greens, and salad for both of us. Then he got down to business. “So you're finishing your book. That's great news. You know I want to write my own book, and now I have an agent in Los Angeles. And, to be honest with you, I'm worried your book has too much in it about me,” he said. “I need to know there will be more to tell. That I can tell it.”

I agreed that he was heavily featured in my book, and I had assumed that would be good news for him. “When we first exchanged emails,” I said, “you asked me to identify you as an expert on global art theft. Well, by the end of this book, that is exactly what I say you are. I say that you are one of the very few people on the planet who understands how global art theft works, and who can talk about the issues with a sense of confidence and expertise.”

Paul cut into his steak. “Look,” he said. “To be honest with you, we've known each other too long to bullshit about these things. Am I right? I just want to make sure I can write my own book, my own story.” His book, Paul said, was just one in a series of commercial enterprises he was exploring. He told me he'd been engaged in negotiations, through his new agent, with a number of television producers on different ideas for projects. He also told me about a friend of his, a master jewel thief in Canada, who had sold his life rights for tens of thousands of dollars. Now that Paul was out of prison, he wanted to make some business decisions about how to move forward. He was, in a way, transforming himself once again. He'd come a long way from the cocky kid roaming the streets of Brighton. He was now hunting for a post–Art Hostage career.

I asked him if he'd read Robert Wittman's book,
Priceless
.

“I'm expecting an autographed copy in the mail,” Paul said. “I hear he sold the movie rights.”

We dropped the subject after lunch and walked back to his house. “I'll give you the tour,” he smiled. The first thing I noticed was that there was art everywhere—on the walls, stacked up against the walls. It wasn't what I was expecting.

“This is all art that's been bought—honestly—over the years. I mean, the police have been through here a few times. You'll notice some of the paintings have little round stickers on them. Those stickers are to show that they've already been inspected by police and are not stolen. It used to be that some of them had two or three stickers on them,” he laughed. “It's like I told you. Don't ever keep anything that's stolen. Always pass it on immediately.”

His collection was varied: a lot of older works, portraits, some pre-Impressionist paintings, and, in the stairwell, a collection of French military portraits. “This is the whole collection of this series,” he said. “If you possess one or two, they're not worth very much... but the more you have in one series, the higher their value. This is the entire series here,” Paul explained, pointing at French soldiers on horses, carrying bayonets. We passed them on the way up the stairs to his bedroom, which was also crowded with art: portraits and landscapes, some of them in beautiful ornate frames. What's that? I asked, pointing at one. “It's from the school of Renoir. You know, all these artists had students, and young painters would mimic their work. From the school of ...”

Paul showed me his Rolex watches, as promised: one silver, one gold. “I don't really wear them often anymore,” he said. “Too flash for me now, to be honest with you.”

Then he led me back downstairs. We went into a room populated by a series of large works by Joseph Maxwell, a Scottish artist with whom Paul had become friends years ago. Every painting in the room was a large work, and one, he pointed out, was unfinished. On a desk were framed photos of Paul and Oliver in Maxwell's studio. Paul showed me one of the letters the artist had written to him. I noticed that it was addressed to Paul Walsh. I had come to know Paul as Paul Hendry.

“Yah, that's just another name I go by sometimes. Hendry, Walsh, it's a long story, and has to do with my complicated family upbringing. . . The adoption and all that.” Next to the Maxwell room was the living room, with a couch, ashtray, and large-screen television. He turned it on. “I usually have this tuned to Bloomberg during the day, while I'm at work,” he said. “But, if I hear a knock at the door. . .” He pressed a button on the
TV
remote and the screen transformed into four security-camera views showing various angles of the outside of his house. “That's impressive,” I said. “So, you know who's out there at all times.”

“It's just an extra precaution,” Paul said. “I was in the middle of having the system installed when the police raided my house.” He laughed. We both eyed the perfect view of the Mercedes parked outside.

“So let me show you the study where it all happens,” he said. “This is where Art Hostage lives.” And he led me into a small room with a desk, a computer, a plush office chair, a broken-down couch, and a built-in bookshelf crammed with books about art theft. Titles included
Art Cop
,
Museum of the Missing
,
The Irish Game
,
Thieves of Baghdad
,
The Gardner Heist
, and
The Rescue Artist
, by Edward Dolnick. There was also a copy of
The Lost Museum
by Hector Feliciano, and
The Rape
of Europa
, by Lynn Nicholas, considered the most authoritative investigation on Holocaust-looted artworks. Lying on the couch was
The Encyclopedia of Popular Antiques
.

On the wall behind the desk were two framed diplomas from the University of Sussex: one for a ba in American Social Studies, the other for an
MA
in Contemporary History. On the wall directly across from his desk was a large poster of Vermeer's
The Concert,
the painting stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Beside the desk, near the door, was a beautiful wooden display case. “Irish secretary bookcase,” Paul explained. “And in decent condition.” Then he looked at the objects in the room and his eyes landed on his desk. “And, if you're curious, that's a California-model desk ordered from Staples.”

He sat down at his computer, which a friend had custom-made for him. “It's a powerful machine, packed with terabytes. It's fast,” he said.

Paul opened up his Art Hostage account. He had ways of seeing who visited the site, he said, and kept files on some of his viewers—their email addresses and
IP
information. “See, I can pinpoint pretty closely who's watching,” he said. He showed me some of his more interesting followers. There were hits from the
FBI
, the Justice Department, the U.S. military. Someone from Jerry Bruckheimer Films had been reading his blog. Eyes from all over the world checked Art Hostage: Canada, Switzerland, Russia, Bosnia, Serbia. “The Montenegro hits are probably from someone in the Pink Panthers,” Paul said. “Remember, thieves have egos too. And they like to know what's being written about them.”

I asked Paul how it was that he could easily see that the
FBI
was looking at his site. “They are so funny. They don't turn off their cookies function. So some guy at the
FBI
is at his laptop, and he's leaving fingerprints all over his Internet searches,” said Paul. “I mean, to be honest with you, if I can gather all this info, and I'm just me, some guy in a room in England who doesn't have all that much education into technology, imagine what someone who knows what they're doing could be gathering. Like terrorists, right?”

Paul had not added a single new post on Art Hostage since his parole, but he showed me a chart that tracked the site's users. Art Hostage was still getting three hundred hits a day. He said he wasn't sure when he was going to start posting again. Prison, he said, had taken its toll. He wasn't feeling up to it these days. Still, watching him show me the stats and the site and point out the constant interest from all over the world, I figured it would only be a matter of time until he resumed his alter ego.

Before I left, I asked Paul if he ever went back to Brighton. He said no, he never did. “You know, it's just not for me to go back there. I have contacts, but, to be honest with you, a lot of the people I know there are still doing the same thing. It's just not the kind of place I need to revisit. You know what I mean?”

Paul asked me who else I'd seen in London, and I said Richard Ellis.

“Did he say anything about me,” Paul asked, in a flat tone.

“He says hello,” I said. “He says, let bygones be bygones.”

Paul thought about it for a moment.

“If you speak to him again, tell him, as far as I'm concerned, we're good.”

It was close to five o'clock when we climbed back into the Mercedes. I closed the door gently this time. Paul pulled out from his house, past the restaurant. He turned on his car's speed-radar alert, just in case any police officers were looking to bust him for going too fast. The sky was its usual leaden overcast, and we followed the roads through the peaceful retirement community.

At the station, we stood in front of the Mercedes and shook hands. He said, “Look, I'm glad you came to see me. I'm sorry if I pressed you on the book stuff, I just want to make sure I can do my own story, right?” I thanked him, and said that I hoped he would write his book, and in his Turbo voice. He told me he had a working title:
Brighton Knock
. That made me laugh—it was perfect.

On the train back to London, the muddy green fields gave way to dirty brick suburbs then to larger apartment blocks and finally to the low horizon of thousands of rooftops. I realized that after all the time we'd been talking, the one thing that seemed to concern Paul, the retired art thief, was that I might steal something from him.

Above Paul's desk had been a painting by Australian artist Ainslie Roberts called
Songman and the Two Suns
. “I bought it online,” Paul said. The palette was fiery reds, oranges, and yellows. In the forefront a tall, sinewy man stood in a small wooden boat, alone on a sea, with two suns behind him. It made me think of the ferryman on the River Styx, crossing over to the underworld. “Roberts used the concept of dream-time in his work,” Paul told me. “Do you know dreamtime?”

Dreamtime is a complex Aborigine idea, according to which we are eternal energy, both before we are born and after we die. For a short time in between, we are delivered into the physical world. The Dreaming was the Creation; when we die, we live on in Dreamtime. Paul had told me his own creation myth, infused with eternal forces: the dark road, the power of greed, a boy's struggle to focus his energy, the quest to learn and master a world, the great hunt for the prize. And that quest did not seem to have an ending. Even now, in his sunset community by the sea, Paul was still restless. He had created the mythical character Art Hostage as a means to continue knocking on doors all over the world, in cyberspace, still searching for the ultimate prize—he just didn't seem to know what exactly that prize was, or which door it was behind.

One week after our meeting, I was in Toronto when Paul sent me an email. The subject line read, “Return of Art, Hostage that is!!!” In his note he said, in part, “I tried to refrain from my usual self but failed and realized I have only one gear
TURBO
.”

Art Hostage was back. Often, when I read about an art theft in the news, I think back to that first conversation with Paul. “Once you start thinking about this subject, you will never be able to stop thinking about it. Every time a painting is stolen somewhere in the world and you read about it in the news, you will feel compelled to think about it, and to know where that painting went. It grabs you and never lets you go.”

16 .

MISSING PIECES

“Sometimes it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
DONALD HRYCYK

D
ONALD HRYCYK
led me downstairs from his office at Parker Center to a small storage room attached to the evidence department. A stack of metal shelves held a dozen or so black cases and tubes.

“We had to order these cases special,” he said. “They're made for artists, for storing canvasses.” He paused. “They were very expensive.” Hrycyk picked up one of the tubes, put it on the floor, and unzipped it. He pulled out a very large canvas and carried it into the hallway, where he put it down on the floor and unrolled it. It was an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Elvis Presley.

“Is it real?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. He rolled it back up, slid it back into its case, and put the case away. He pointed to a framed painting on the shelf. It looked like a Renoir—a beautiful portrait of a woman staring out at the little evidence closet.